In a seasonal Soapbox, SinZine's Sexy Dave - a columnist who considers excess his "true calling in life", counts the reasons why he'll be staying home and shouting 'humbug' at the telly this NYE. Overpriced, overcrowded clubs, pressure to pretend it's the time of your life, unpractised hedonists puking their guts up long before midnight has come to pass; the incentives to avoid amateurs' night are indeed almost as numerous as those we might want to list for attending AntiChrist's 10 zone, 10 hour 'Not New Years Eve' party on December 30th instead....
Ah, New Years Eve. The one night in the calendar when we can all come together in the spirit of goodwill, see out the old year and in the new with a few drinks. Is it bollocks. It’s the ultimate fucking amateur’s night, the one night in the year where everyone who doesn’t know how to party tries really really hard, and gets it spectacularly wrong. Usually, all over your shoes.
Fancy dress, special events, rammed bars and clubs where its £20 to get in, and takes half an hour to get a bloody pint. Except you can’t get a pint, you have to have an extra special New Years cocktail that is green, tastes like an aborted rats foetus and means you can never eat After Eight Mints again. Drunk slags are vomiting red with chunks in the gutter by 5pm. Camden, the West End, your local Town Centre and even Sainsbury’s are a war zone of spewed guts and bawling and brawling idiots.
New Years Eve my friends, is the antithesis of a good time. Hyped beyond an inch of its life, it is the ultimate in enforced jollity. You simple MUST do something big and over the top and have absolutely the most amazing night out of you lives, otherwise you didn’t enjoy New Years and you are in fact a failure as a human being in the 21st century. And so we observe the NYE reveller – grinning inanely throughout, throwing whatever they can lay their hands on down their throats or up their noses in a shameless attempt to convince themselves that they are having a wonderful time and that this is in fact the best New Years EVER. It’s not, it’s empty and soulless, and we all die a little inside whenever we tell ourselves this lie.
What bother’s me most about this is that I actually like the idea of New Years as a party night. In a calendar full of inane or quasi-religious celebrations, it’s a simple but significant cause for a party, unencumbered by much of the dogma of other calendar holidays. And don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of excess, it’s the one thing I consider to be my true calling in life. But therein lies the problem – the majority of the populace just cannot handle this shit. They sit at home watching Strictly Come Dancing most of the year, with a monthly ‘big night out’ to the pub and a bi-annual ‘night out up town’ – the simple fact is that they are rubbish at partying. Their idea of a big night out, dear sinner, is what we would call a quiet Tuesday.
This New Years Eve, I plan to get in a few nice bottles of wine and watch people die horrifically in war films and pretend they’re the brain dead wankers I can hear hooting at the houseparty two doors down. To commemorate the passing of another year, I shall pop outside to see the fireworks at midnight. And then, I will throw my empties at them.
